Mexican Bites, from the Tasty Side of the Tracks

A new street cart, which parks under the Long Island Rail Road overpass on Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside, makes crave-worthy quesadillas to order, E Eto reports. He’s hooked on the one filled with chicharrón (pork rind) and calabaza (zucchini); there’s also one filled with stewed chicken. Tortillas are pressed to order, stuffed, and finished with crema, shredded lettuce, and a mere sprinkling of Cotija cheese—in other words, he adds, this is “not the gooey, cheesy thing that you might be accustomed to imagining a quesadilla to be.”

This cart, staffed by friendly ladies from Puebla, is in business pretty much all day and late into the evening, possibly even 24 hours, hounds report. elbev says it also offers tacos filled with excellent carnitas and very good beefsteak. As for the quesadillas, elbev finds them fresh and delicious but a notch below those turned out by a crew of vendors who emerged last year on 82nd Street in Jackson Heights, a little over a mile to the east.

Those who would rather not chow down in a dingy underpass can walk a block or so west for an alfresco snack on the benches outside the Duane Reade drugstore, E Eto suggests.

The new cart is the second to stake out a spot under the tracks. It joins a vendor who’s been on the hound radar for a couple of years for his tamales, most notably strapping Oaxaqueños filled with pork or chicken and wrapped in banana leaf, a relative rarity around New York. The news here, Joe MacBu reports, is the addition of Oaxacan mole negro. Go early in the day, Joe advises—“The times I’ve gotten them around 11am, they have been moist, tender and blissful.”